Review: American Dad “Steve’s Franken Out”

 

Overview:

Halloween spirit is alive and well in Langley Falls and a spooky atmosphere has captured the community. Steve ends up with unexpectedly macabre plans for the holiday when his science project with Billy progresses into some dark arts that betray the natural order of the world. Steve struggles to keep a reanimated corpse under wraps as he gets pushed further away from his original goal of reconnecting with Snot. Steve has enough to worry about with a reanimated riot under foot, but the rest of Langley get lost in enough hazardous waste to trigger a radioactive revolution.

 

Our Take:

TV series can find a lot of freedom and build their own traditions through the use of yearly holiday episodes. American Dad has regularly turned to Christmas installments for some of their biggest and boldest stories, but there’s been a recent shift to heightened Halloween entries. Halloween’s association with supernatural subject matter can allow these episodes to go to even more exaggerated places than usual. American Dad is frequently at its best when it embraces its weirder impulses. However, episodes like “Steve’s Franken Out” also prove that a spooky premise isn’t enough and without a strong enough foundation it can all fall to pieces, like an unembalmed corpse.

Perhaps it’s not the best idea to look too deep into an episode of American Dad that’s clearly meant to function as a silly Halloween escape from reality, but there’s still a lot in this episode that could be tightened with minimal alterations. Lewis could have pit Steve and Billy against each other and gotten more out of their time together here. Instead, Classic Principal Lewis becomes Steve’s unlikely partner in the episode’s final act. This is also territory that “Steve’s Franken Out” could have done more with and instead it just feels like the two work together because there’s no one else for Steve to turn to for help.

A lot of “Steve’s Franken Out” props itself up on a city-wide epidemic that threatens to cancel Langley’s full week of Halloween festivities. There’s a lot of attention placed on Octaduel, only for it to largely get ignored until the episode’s final act. American Dad teases a bit of a Jaws-esque ultimatum where the city must choose between holiday havoc or general safety, which would have been a rich angle here, but it never goes anywhere. The entire Smith family, minus Steve, are consumed with Octaduel, which leads to a frustrating imbalance in the episode. There’s the potential for greater payoff here than with Franken-Lewis.

American Dad is hardly beholden to always giving Roger a prominent role, but Halloween seems like such a natural environment for him to run amok. There’s even the potential in him introducing Rogu to the holiday for the first time. Admittedly, there’s a brief dose of Roger greatness–which amounts to one of the better gags from the episode–when one of the alien’s personas is at the head of the Octaduel scandal, while another Roger persona looks on and dismisses how obvious it is that Roger is this mystery figure at the center of Octaduel. It’s a joke that’s been done several times before in the series, but never to this degree of absurdity where Roger himself is the one who’s calling out his own nonsense. 

It wouldn’t have been difficult to naturally connect this formaldehyde wackiness with Steve and Billy’s grave-robbing escapades, but “Steve’s Franken Out” is largely content to let these ideas occupy their own islands. Steve’s story would become stronger if it didn’t have to shoulder the brunt of expectations and ultimately spread itself too thin. The Octaduel plot leads to some misinformed formaldehyde junkies and crude visual humor, but not much else. There’s no conclusion to this storyline and the last we see the rest of the Smith family they’re literally in pieces in the living room. 

“Steve’s Franken Out” is a serviceable episode of American Dad that struggles the more that it’s put under great scrutiny. It’s a perfectly entertaining enough dose of Halloween madness that may be one of the weaker installments of the season, but it also comes across as a bonus episode and a surprise holiday treat for many who assumed that the season was already over. The broader strokes are often awkward, but there’s still a lot of isolated surreal humor that’s appropriate for the Halloween season. Bartelby’s graphic death lingers long after it’s over and Lewis’ absurdist neon dinosaur monster truck is another home run. Anjelica Huston also shows up as Lewis’ Boo Brunch date, which is a surprisingly high caliber of talent to pull together for such a random role. However, much like Frankenstein’s Monster, “Steve’s Franken Out” often feels like a messy collection of pieces that do form a greater whole, but it’s not always pretty or natural. 

Audiences may not expect to find emotional catharsis in an exaggerated Halloween episode, but American Dad’s “Steve’s Franken Out” settles on the comforting realization that the key to happiness is to be the Lorelei to someone else’s Rory and that the bliss of a Gilmore Girls style relationship is a bond that’s too powerful to deny. 

Or something. 

Happy Halloween?

Now hurry, there’s just enough time to put together a Franken-Lewis and Bartelby the Zombie Turtle couples’ costume for Halloween.